Pope Francis made headlines back in 2013 when he responded to an open letter published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica by its atheist editor Eugenio Scalfari. Scalfari asked “if God forgives those who do not believe and do not seek faith if they sincerely obey their conscience?” The Pope’s answer: “God’s forgiveness and mercy is open even to the Godless”; the “key task for unbelievers is to obey their conscience; the goodness or the wickedness of our behavior depends on this decision.”
Predictably, some in the media seized the moment to contend that the Pope was diminishing the Church’s role in salvation history and suggesting a moral equivalence between Christianity and atheism. There is no reason to think that. Francis was restating Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of our obligation to follow our conscience even when it is in error. (Providing, of course, as stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that we “have made a sincere effort to form a correct conscience.”)
This has long been the teaching of the Church. It is also a truth confirmed by our personal experiences in life. I would wager that most of those reading this column know atheists who are good people, gentle, kind, with a genuine commitment to social justice.
But that leaves us with the question of whether all atheists reach their conclusion about the nonexistence of God in a sincere manner. Do most of them do that? Just some? Why do atheists not believe in God?
It strikes me that atheists would want to spend some time with a column by Robert H. Nelson published last spring in The Conversation, if they are serious about forming a correct conscience in this matter. (The Conversation is a web page established, in its founder’s words, to provide “an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public.”)
Nelson holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and is a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland; he is also the author of eight books and more than 100 scholarly articles.
He entitles his article “Five rational reasons why God (very probably) does exist.”
(It can be accessed at https://religionnews.com/author/robert-h-nelson.)
Nelson seeks to demonstrate why it is logical to hold through reason alone that God exists, in an effort to persuade those who are unwilling to accept Jesus’ instruction about the existence and nature of the Father. It is what the scholars call natural theology, the study of the arguments for the existence of God based on reason and the ordinary experience of nature, unaided by Revelation.
1) Nelson begins with the “laws of math.” Why does the universe operate in an orderly and measurable fashion, everything from the orbits of the planets to the precise flow of blood through our body?
He writes, “Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as physicists of the 17th century. Other physicists sought his help in finding a mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system. Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation but in the end he conceded failure. He could say only that it is the will of God.
“Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. It takes the existence of some kind of a God to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible. It is a mystery that lies beyond science.”
Nelson is on the mark. Asking us to accept that the order in the universe is a result of blind chance is like asking us to accept that the complexity and precision of a Beethoven composition came about when a hurricane swept through a warehouse of sheet music and threw it all together. We would never accept that to be true, regardless of how many billions of hurricanes took place.
2) “The workings of human consciousness,” Nelson continues, “are similarly miraculous. Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical presence in the world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable dimensions. Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies.”
Our minds lead us to create works of art, find cures for sickness, design the computers that have transformed our modern world. “The supernatural character of the workings of human consciousness,” writes Nelson, “offers a second strong rational grounds for raising the probability of the existence of a supernatural God,” a First Cause of the universe, an Unmade Maker.
3) The impact of Darwin’s theories. Nelson writes, “Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1859 offered a theoretical explanation for a strictly physical mechanism by which the current plant and animal kingdoms might have come into existence, and assumed their current forms, without any necessary role for a God.” But modern scientists are finding this explanation too simple to accept.
“From the 1970s onwards, the Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, for example, complained that little evidence could be found in the fossil record of the slow and gradual evolution of species as theorized by Darwin.
“In 2011, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist James Shapiro explained that, remarkably enough, many micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by a purposeful ‘sentience’ of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves — a concept far removed from the random selection processes of Darwinism. With these developments bringing standard evolutionary understandings into growing question, the probability of a God existing has increased correspondingly.”
4) Miraculous ideas occurring at the same time in history. “For the past 10,000 years at a minimum,” Nelson notes, “the most important changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring in the realm of human ideas. In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.), world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East — these peoples then having little interaction with one another.”
Why did that happen? Nelson argues we are looking at a “revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in scientific materialism, that drove the process.” He sees the phenomenon as “further rational evidence for the conclusion that human beings may well be made ‘in the image of a God’.”
5) Different forms of worship. Nelson quotes a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 by the essayist David Foster Wallace: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Why does this yearning exist — in humans as different from each other as the tribes of the Amazon jungles and the yuppies in the bustling metropolises of the industrialized world? Why is it that all cultures yearn to believe in a supreme being, in a divine order?
The Marxists say religion is a projection of our human ideals upon an imaginary spiritual being. Nelson sees it differently, as a universal longing that indicates we have been made in the image and likeness of our Creator and long to live our lives in conformity with His will, that we have been made to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
In his PBS 1980s television series Cosmos, Carl Sagan would explain all the wonders of the universe with the observation that it took “billions and billions and billions of years” for evolution to bring them about.
No matter how precise and orderly and awe-inspiring the natural phenomenon he was analyzing, that was always his answer: “billions and billions and billions of years” of evolution. Robert H. Nelson makes more sense to me. Jesus, too.

Vatican City, Feb 17, 2018 / 05:10 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Saturday the Vatican announced that Pope Francis has reconfirmed Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston as head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, also reconfirming seven members…Continue Reading

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In response to the Trump administration’s 2019 federal budget proposal on Monday, the U.S. Catholic bishops are urging for a budget that shows greater concern for “‘the least of these” and warning that the U.S. “must never seek…Continue Reading

A Connecticut high school student may have to decide whether to remove a Planned Parenthood sticker on her laptop or leave her Catholic school after administrators told her to remove it, her parents said. Sophomore Kate Murray’s parents told the Greenwich Time that…Continue Reading

February 8, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The Bible’s condemnation of homosexual acts should be taken in “context” with Biblical times, Jesuit Father James Martin toldGeorgetown University students recently. Martin said as well that Catholics who support gay “marriage” should have no problem…Continue Reading

JACKSON, Mississippi, February 2, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A bill banning abortion on babies more than 15 weeks old passed the Mississippi state House today 79-31. House Bill 1510 would make Mississippi the state with the most pro-life laws if it…Continue Reading

Just three Democrats in the U.S. Senate supported a bill on Monday that would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks when unborn babies are capable of feeling pain. The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which has strong public support from Republicans…Continue Reading

ROME, January 30, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – In an exclusive interview two weeks after issuing a profession of immutable truths about sacramental marriage, Bishop Athanasius Schneider is inviting his brother bishops around the world to join in raising a common voice…Continue Reading

As Katholisch.de, the official website of the German bishops, reports today, Cardinal Willem Eijk, the Dutch cardinal and Metropolitan Archbishop of Utrecht, requested that Pope Francis bring light into the confusion concerning the question as to how to deal with…Continue Reading

When Selena Miller, a practicing Catholic, applied to DePaul, she had no idea it was a Catholic university. Damita Meneves, another practicing Catholic, said she has met only one other Catholic student in her first year at DePaul. DePaul is…Continue Reading

His Eminence, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, spoke recently with Thinking with the Church, hosted by Chris Altieri, who is also a regular contributor to Catholic World Report. Cardinal Burke responds to questions regarding the interpretation and reception of the post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris…Continue Reading

Untitled 5Untitled 2

Attention Readers: Welcome to
our website. Readers who are familiar with The Wanderer know we have been
providing Catholic news and orthodox commentary for 150 years in our weekly
print edition.
Our daily version offers only some of what we publish weekly in print. To take
advantage of everything The Wanderer publishes, we encourage you to
subscribe
to our flagship weekly print edition,
which is mailed every Friday or, if you want to view it in its entirety online,
you can subscribe to the E-edition,
which is a replica of the print edition. Our daily edition includes: a selection of
material from recent issues of our print edition, news stories updated daily
from renowned news sources, access to archives from The Wanderer from the past
10 years, available at a minimum charge (this will be expanded as time goes
on). Also: regularly updated features where we go back in time and highlight
various columns and news items covered in The Wanderer over the past 150 years.
And: a comments section in which your remarks are encouraged, both good and bad,
including suggestions. We encourage you to become a daily visitor to
our site. If you appreciate our site, tell your friends. As Catholics we must
band together to rediscover our faith and share it with the world if we are to
effectively counter a society whose moral culture seems to have no boundaries
and a government whose rapidly extending reach threatens to extinguish the
rights of people of faith to practice their religion (witness the HHS mandate).
Now more than ever, vehicles like The Wanderer are needed for clarification and
guidance on the issues of the day. Catholic, conservative, orthodox, and loyal to the
Magisterium have been this journal’s hallmarks for five generations. God
willing, our message will continue well into this century and beyond.

By DON FIER (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and Founder of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis., graciously took time out of his busy schedule to grant The Wanderer a wide-ranging interview during a recent visit to the Shrine. Included among the topics…Continue Reading

By RAYMOND LEO CARDINAL BURKE (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke delivered the address below at the 32nd Annual Church Teaches Forum, “The Message of Fatima: Peace for the World,” Galt House, Louisville, Ky., July 22, 2017. The address is reprinted here with the kind permission of Cardinal Burke. All rights reserved. This is part one of the…Continue Reading

Catechism

Today . . .

There’s nothing, it seems, that the abortion chain Planned Parenthood won’t sue over. On Thursday, affiliates of the abortion chain in seven states sued the Trump administration for cutting funding for their questionable teen pregnancy prevention programs. The Daily Nonpareil reports the lawsuits argue that the Trump administration wrongly cut their funding prematurely and without cause. Nine groups, including Planned Parenthood affiliates in Washington, Iowa, North Carolina, South C

CAMBRIDGE, England, February 15, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A respected Catholic historian and philosopher challenged Cardinal Blase Cupich during a lecture last week about Pope’ Francis so-called “revolution of mercy” that has caused what many are defending as a “paradigm shift” in Catholic practice. Professor John Rist, after listening to a February 9 lecture at Cambridge Universityin which Cardinal Cupich praised Pope Francis’ “paradigm shift” in Catholic practice, asked the Cardinal at the end of the lect

VIENNA, Austria, February 14, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Austria’s bishops, led by Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, are indignant over a retired bishop’s passionate defense of Catholic teaching in opposing Church “blessings” for homosexual unions. After Bishop Andreas Laun, the retired Auxiliary Bishop of Salzburg, Austria, published Monday his strong rebuke of the German bishops for proposing to bless homosexual couples, there has been an inten

Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago is all for clarity. It has been a consistent theme, as when in September of 2017 he issued a decree banning guns in all parishes, schools and other facilities across the archdiocese “so there would be absolute clarity on our position.” His official statement put “clarity” in italics. When he was bishop of Rapid City, he called for “civility and clarity” in discussing legislation that would limit abortion, but he…Continue Reading

BEIJING — A group of influential Catholics published an open letter Monday express their shock and disappointment at report that the Vatican could soon reach a deal with the Chinese government, warning that it could create a schism in the church in China. The Holy See has been in negotiations for several years with the Chinese Communist Party and is now belie

Advertisement(2)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Within a week of taking office on January 23, 2017, President Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, now called the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance, which bans U.S. funding for abortions overseas. The expanded policy prohibits $9 billion in U.S. taxpayer money from funding foreign organizations that perform or…Continue Reading

By HANNAH BROCKHAUS VATICAN CITY (CNA/EWTN News) — The Congregation for the Causes of Saints has approved the second miracle needed for the canonization of Blessed Pope Paul VI, allowing his canonization to take place, possibly later this year. According to Vatican Insider, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approved the miracle by a…Continue Reading

By STEPHEN M. KRASON (Editor’s Note: Stephen M. Krason’s Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic column appears monthly [sometimes bimonthly] in Crisis. He is professor of political science and legal studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is also cofounder and president of…Continue Reading

By LISA BOURNE (Editor’s Note: LifeSiteNews ran this story on February 5.) + + + A Catholic priest is calling on bishops to excommunicate the 14 Catholic-identifying U.S. senators who voted two weeks ago against banning late-term abortions. He is also calling on priests to deny the Catholic pro-abortion senators Holy Communion. “Today is the…Continue Reading

By JAMES LIKOUDIS The centuries-old theological debate concerning the existence of Limbo for unbaptized babies (the limbo puerorum as a state of natural happiness) led to the 2007 publication of the document The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized by the International Theological Commission (ITC). The commission concluded there are “serious…Continue Reading

Advertisement

Our Catholic Faith (Section B of print edition)

By DON FIER For a variety of reasons (a defect of consent, a diriment impediment, or a defect of the required form), many supposed modern-day marriages entered into by Catholic persons are invalid from their origin in the eyes of God and the Church. However, as we saw last week, depending on the circumstances, the Church has procedures by which…Continue Reading

Q. Concerning what our Blessed Mother said in Fatima about the rosary, I am confused as to whether or not she meant us to meditate on the mysteries while we are praying the Hail Marys or whether she meant us to meditate on the mysteries right before we say the Hail Marys. The consensus seems to be that we are…Continue Reading

By FR. ROBERT ALTIER Second Sunday Of Lent Readings: Gen. 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18 Romans 8:31b-34 Mark 9:2-10 In the first reading today we hear about Abraham’s nearly incomprehensible act of faith and love for God shown in his willingness to sacrifice his own son. We have to be careful not to read this in a vacuum. This test, which…Continue Reading

By ANDREA GAGLIARDUCCI (Wanderer Editor’s Note: Catholic News Agency on February 3 published a commentary concerning a 1989 Vatican response to dissent against Humanae Vitae. Below is an excerpted version of that commentary. Following that, we reprint the full text of the 1989 Vatican response, which, as the CNA commentary explains, is now available on the Vatican’s website. Please also…Continue Reading

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK A joke sometimes recounted among clergy goes along these lines: Someone greets a wise old priest by asking, “What’s new?”, and he responds, sagely, “Christ is risen!” The humor here is less about what’s new than about the fact that everything, other than the only true revolution of Christ’s Incarnation and triumph over death, is…Continue Reading

By CAROLE BRESLIN Great sinners make great saints. It takes a strong-willed child to become a saint. These are statements which would easily fit saints such as Mary Magdalene and St. Augustine. In the thirteenth century, a young lady free in spirit and strong in will led such a life that she was essentially driven from her home village, but…Continue Reading

By CAROLE BRESLIN In the lives of the saints one thing is very common: They have such a strong desire to do God’s will that nothing will hinder their work. Many saints, despite illness, weak health, or many other obstacles achieved their goals. Frequently the amount of work accomplished by such individuals seems humanly impossible — and, of course, it…Continue Reading